Sony Demonstrates Virtual Reality For Games At GDC [Update 3]

“Virtual reality is the next innovation from PlayStation,” Sony’s head of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, said during a panel at GDC today.

Yoshida went on to show off a build of God of War III that had been modified to work with a first-person view using a VR headset that was handmade by Sony’s Santa Monica studio, the developers of God of War. The headset was a prototype built using an HMz Sony headset with a PlayStation Move controller attached to it for head tracking, and the brief demo showed Kratos tearing someone apart from a first-person camera perspective.

Prototyping continued, and as of 2012, Sony had come up with the headset design pictured above.

As of 2014, Sony have come up with “Project Morpheus” for PlayStation 4, Yoshida said. This is another prototype design and is pictured above. Yoshida stated that Sony have been working on this for three years now, but that it is not a final representation of how PlayStation will deliver VR.

However, Yoshida said that the device is playable at GDC, and that attendees will be able to try it out, as Sony are looking to gather feedback.

Following Yoshida’s presentation, Richard Marks from Sony Computer Entertainment America R&D stepped up. Marks had worked with NASA and briefly talked about a Mars demo that was developed using VR, in collaboration with Wwise and Unity.

Sight, sound tracking, control, ease of use, and content are the six elements Sony needs to tackle for VR, Marks said. Or rather, to “achieve presence,” as he put it. Marks mentioned that the headset has a light on it, so that it can be tracked by the camera the same way the controller can.

Sony are currently working on getting tools to developers like Crytek, Unity, Silicon Studio, Epic Games, Criware and Wwise, to facilitate the development of VR content.

Sony’s Anton Mikhlov was up next. Mikhlov helped design the PlayStation Move controller and talked about designing games using virtual reality. He touched upon points like motion sickness, arm positioning problems and how to achieve good presence in a virtual reality environment. In this regard, Mikhlov listed the following tips:

Keep latency low

Keep framerate high

Calibrate well

Render clear images

3D audio will seal the deal

He then went on to talk about contact points and haptic feedback, citing driving games as an example. Not just a wheel, but pedals and even the seat are important to help increase presence, Mikhlov said. Meanwhile, in shooting games, having a gun attachment peripheral would help increase presence. The takeaway was to match your controller to what your VR avatar would use in the game.

For online multiplayer games, Mikhlov said, VR could be used to convey body language, due to head tracking. Beyond games, virtual reality could be used for virtual tourism and other interactive media. However, developers must be careful while developing using VR, Mikhlov cautioned. Presence amplifies emotion, he said, and VR can create a sense of vertigo, claustrophobia or even fear of the dark.

Mikhlov then talked about the development kit for the prototype headset. The devkit has a processing unit that streams what’s on the headset onto a screen. He pointed out that people can wear the headset with glasses. It supports 1080p and a 90+ degree field of view with 15 mm eye relief.

The headset has true spatial sound and binaural audio, Mikhlov stated. It renders sound the same way visuals are rendered, and the ergonomics are highly adjustable, with support for custom headphones. Most of the weight of the headset is placed on the head to make it more comfortable. Some of the VR demos that will be playable at GDC include an EVE: Valkyrie demo, and a Thief demo developed by Square Enix, with a section of the game in VR.

Following Mikhlov’s presentation, a Q&A session was held. Currently, the headset is wired (5 meters) and is not cross-platform with the Oculus Rift, as no APIs have been developed for this. Sony would not discuss whether or not the headset would work with PCs or with mobile devices, but did say that a PlayStation 4 can use one VR helmet.

I remember going to the Comic-Con a few months back and tried out one of the VR Helmets they had there (wasn’t Sony) and got to see a Virtual World with a first-person view and it was AWESOME! Even if it was looping race car track and you were in the driver’s seat, but it was so cool to see the Virtual World like that.

I really like to see it become a reality one day, for certain games at least and perhaps a few MMOs as well… minus the whole falling into comas or being trapped inside a Virtual World for 2 years.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with next with it!

Areuto

Dude…I was there!!!

Christopher Nunes

Really? That’s awesome.

Six

Interested in seeing how it compares to the Oculus Rift.

Firion Hope

Oh man Im so excited for this, something resembling .Hack or SAO could finally form

Avaricious

As long as my brain does not get fried if I try to take the VR headset off and there’s a log out button i’m good.

karldeck

No nerve link yet, buddy.

Land of Green Pasture

dem nerve link, “ethic code off”

Eder García

its official… the next SAO game will be PS4 exclusive

AuraGuyChris

So you meant to say over 10,000 players will become trapped in there while it’s revealed Sony is evil?

…

Nice.

Six

As a .hack fan, the amount of people mentioning SAO on the various forums is making me sad. D:

Land of Green Pasture

happened to me though, but come on, just treat it as two different genres already… their focuses are just different.. it’s just sao’ s timing is somehow better

Damn you feel old? That anime came out when I was graduating from college! lol.

Areuto

well I’m in high school but I feel the oldest one here..I mean I was thinking tech wouldn’t come for ages since I watched hack//sign but woah…

Samsara09

it would be quite an epic adventure if we used those things,got trapped in a VR and had to fight for our lives…not.

ZnTxn

As a fan of Corrector Yui, I’m sad most people ignore this mahou shoujo in a virtual reality in favor of .hack, SAO and Log Horizon; and even more sad when all sides are complaining about one or the other.

:(.

Kai2591

oh hey I read a volume of that once.

lol.

Firion Hope

I like both actually, even if I vastly prefer the style of .hack. Im just excited for that type of thing in general

Pyrofrost

Agreed 100%!

<3 the style of .hack; and this kind of gadget has the potential to be so awesome. If I could, I would give you a "lazy 8" in upvotes. :3

quasadra

im just confused as to why people mention sao(cant remember how .hack does its user interface). the tech is completely different.

Six

.hack uses a VR headset and a controller.

FlameEmperor

Same heree. I hope they released a new Dot Hack game with this.

PoweredByHentai

The problem here is that there hasn’t been a new .hack game that is “relevant” to the international gaming community. What we got in the past year was an iOS game and I have no idea if that ever went on Android.

Kumiko Akimoto

It is it’s pretty good too

ishyg

I feel you.

Ultima-X

Agreed.

natchu96

As an SAO fan, the amount of people mentioning SAO is still sad :/

Raltrios

As a former .hack fan and a current SAO fan, the number of people mentioning SAO doesn’t surprise me.

RichyGaming

I’d love to play “The World”. Imagine PKers and keywords. More people would actually go on forums too. The most hype thing would be the Tournaments.

But I’ll be surprised if the damn game wasn’t filled with bugs and viruses. Dat rengeki though…

Hope there’s at least a way for this to work as some sort of monitor too.

If it requires work from the dev’s, I can see most of them not caring about it

Guest

I wonder what Gunpei Yokoi would had thought of this, VR in the way to become an industry standard, now with the Oculus Rift team, Valve and now Sony too…

lordsofskulls

I hope that i get to experience .hack/Sword Online experience before i die as a gamer. That is my One of Truest Dreams as a Video Gamer. Ever Since i saw .hack for first time.

Lumi

Hopefully you don’t die BECAUSE of that.

Iluz

doesn’t matter, had VR.
Srsly, going down while fighting a virtual dragon wouldn’t be that bad, especially if IRL I’ll be old (and I probably will be old by the time something like this comes out. Assuming that I’ll be alive at all, that is) but my avatar is all young n’ funky.

I thought that the Oculus Rift developers would know better than to rely entirely on a single vendor for a critical component.

At least whatever Oculus Rift games are out seem to be compatible with Morpheus. EVE: Valkyrie, especially.

Lucky Dan

That’s where Nintendo went wrong, they released the gamepad rather than refine and focus what they have.

Sony VR will fail even if they fell on a critical component shortage unless they bundle it with their next system etc, hell you can play VR hentai games on the Oculus Rift so they are light year aheads in both pre-orders and sales compared to the Sony VR.

Guest

I suppose they could sell the VR headset at loss, just like PS4 and Vita, to try to stimulate sales. But just like you said Oculus Rift solutions might be ahead because of the characteristics the platform it is on; just to say something, modding for games could be crazy with Oculus Rift…

Lucky Dan

You’ve already seen the best “features” of the Oculus Rift already ^_^

Morpheus represents a first generation attempt at VR. It was in testing, phasing, and conception way before Oculus Rift.— Ahsan Rasheed (@thuway) March 19, 2014

Lucky Dan

But your forgetting one critical part, the MORPHEUS has NO GAMES (seems like the main theme for Sony for the first 5 years of console release) , the Oculus Rift does.

Sony always does this spread things too far apart and too thin thus never finishing anything. Even Nintendo got the Virtual Boy out in under a year after announcement. Probably be released when Oculus Rift is out in full force full of the best virtual *ahem* girlfriend games on the planet while Morpheous just learnt how to program Pong in 3D.

PoweredByHentai

It is STILL a PROTOTYPE. Your Oculus Rift is also still in Prototype and doesn’t look like it will ever enter mass production.

Zero_Destiny

All right Dan. After all this time, and all these warnings, you still are up to your typical shenanigans.

Quick to console war things, full of nothing but complaints, arguing with everyone over petty things. We’re done here, you had plenty of chances and warnings. Banned.

Wake

Sony has been sitting on VR tech for a while now. I’m sure the popularity of the Oculus Rift made them take notice and spurred them to finally make use of the said VR tech.

It’s the same story with the Move. Sony already had the tech even before the reveal of the Wii.

Lucky Dan

Incorrect, they had the idea but they didn’t do anything. Anyone could of thought the dot Hack Virtual Reality head set or the waggle mechanics sure but then your saying in literal words you just gave me “anyone with American Patents should have the supreme right away cause they patented the idea not the product”, so your actually supporting those types of people indirectly and that in a nutshell is what you said.

Even then the Virtual Boy was released way before those 2, may have sucked sales wise but actually put it in practice.

But they are coming in second like the Wii mote and VR headset no point in re-releasing technology that is already out there. They done the correct thing with the Blu-ray releasing it first but not with the peripheral which will be non-essential to the system it’s just a second afterthought. If they release it with Sony Playstation 5 if consoles are still around I can see it working but it will not if they release it separately.

Kumiko Akimoto

Because there’s no vr for consoles?

Guest

But unlike the Wii, Crystal Cove isn’t released yet, so they are trying to win this “format” war, basically…

If they achieve getting their VR headset as standard, it’d basically help in their financials. It’s once again VHS vs. Beta or HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray or MiniDisc vs. MP3 player (?).

But this time this will have to race against not only to Oculus’ product but to Valve’s VR solution too, strong contender, as they move well around the PC market.

shuyai

Sony are developing VR headset before Oculus Rift(3+year vs 2) anyway development time doesnt matter or are you saying we should support who every doing it first and drop all development on similar product? in that case xbox shouldn’t have been born.

the bottom line is competition alway makes a product cheaper and better for us as a consumer and the market can easily handle more that 2 or three competitor

i will reserve my judgment on which is better until they are both released.

This might be good tech or bad tech….
If this tech developed further well like 50-100 years in future VR become stable and real deal…. then i’m not gonna surprised human never out to “real” world
anyway game like .Hack, Digimon,SAO or Log horizon might be possible now?
In the past Nintendo already got this idea by making virtual boy but the tech aren’t there yet in that time… i dunno about this..
i will be fun if they can use it to playstasion home
also doesn’t VR in this stage somehow like watch TV at very close range?